Having worked at a company with very nice people and no fire to actually get things done (just platitudes), it can be just as bad of an environment if your goal is to succeed. Often times people come in to "play work" and achieve only a fraction of what's possible.
Fire and courtesy are hardly incompatible. But it's more than twice as hard to achieve both as to manage one or the other.
It's also a question of circumstance. Right now, for example, I'm working to mitigate, and eventually to resolve, a morale crisis on my team, which exists for good and cogent reasons that don't merit discussion here. Now is not the time for fire - and fire alone in any case works only when the vision is so powerful that smart, capable people will tolerate being driven painfully hard to achieve it. Without offering something to make that worthwhile, fire can't drive them onward - it can only drive them away.
Fire is not always the solution to any problem of course, but a lack of being results driven can make for large morale problems in itself - especially in engineering where you can keep working on one insignificant detail or another in perpetuity. I've spent months constantly asking for business goals to be set so we can meet them and being told to hang tight. I've left those companies because the environment becomes quite toxic over time, with the "true believers" believing that everything is going swimmingly because they don't have any pressure put on them, and the ones looking to accomplish things spinning their wheels fiercely in the mud.
In any case, I'm not trying to argue with you, and I hope I don't come across as if I were. It's just that I feel like there's a strong reaction in this thread to a bias, whether perceived or actual, on the part of the article author and in the direction of courtesy. So my purpose here is to sound a cautionary note, and attempt to keep visible in the discussion what I regard to be the nuance of the matter.
Especially since a lot of engineers default to brusqueness, which I totally understand while finding often counterproductive. It can work in a collegial setting, among secure peers who share mutual respect, but in any other context it just looks like asshole behavior - and that is exactly what it is.
To understand one's audience, and adjust one's persuasive style to suit, is a fundamental aspect of rhetoric, and given the ubiquity of office politics and the necessity thereof - a topic meriting its own essay, which I will not write on a phone - such understanding and adjustment is important to professional success, as well. I think that's something it is easy for us to overlook, because computers only need to be told and then sworn at, not persuaded.
Also, all else equal, it's both more ethically sound and more useful not to act like an asshole. Leaving a trail of hurt feelings behind you is no way to go through life. Sure, we might excuse it in someone with a vision on par with that of Steve Jobs. But no one here is on par with Steve Jobs.
